It was quite a day for fans of colour-based prejudice in football yesterday. First you had the draw for the next round of matches inthe Alleged Racism Cup (John Terry will take on Patrice Evra, while Suarez is away to Anton Ferdinand) . Then Sepp Blatter managed to horrify all supporters of the Kick Racism Out campaign by launching his own Kick Racism Back In campaign. Surely no right-minded invididual (and thankfully it seems the England team has now solved its lack of a left-minded individual) could go along with Blatter’s belief that racist abuse on the field could be solved by a simple handshake after the game. I suppose we should be grateful he didn’t go on to say that the white players should probably wash their hands afterwards.

Of course, it’s not the first time the head of FIFA’s shown himself to be out of touch. Just look at his refusal to embrace technology, a belief I presume he carries into the rest of his life, refusing to use fridges, TVs, phones etc and telling his howling wife as she gave birth that she couldn’t have pain relief or any medical intervention as human error is all part of the game. But this time the outcry’s clearly got to him. He very had a picture posted on the FIFA website of him hugging South Africa’s Housing Minister, Tokyo Sexwale. The hug between them is so fulsome, so far beyond Blatter’s suggested post-abuse handshake, that you wonder whether just beforehand he’d not only used the N-word on Tokyo but staged a Minstrel show culminating in a full “Mammee” with jazz hands.

The good news is we can now call Blatter a stupid old racist twat as long as we shake hands with him afterwards. And at least FIFA may now seriously look at this matter. They’ll probably decide to officially sanction one racist comment every four years, with countries able to lobby a small number of delegates with what could easily be interpreted as bribes to vote for the comment to take place on their soil (early favourite with the bookies is for “Spoonfaced Towelhead” to be uttered in Sao Paolo in 2016).

For now, it’s urgent that the FIFA leadership make their position on racism clear and I fully expect that later on today Blatter will finally come out and say that there’s absolutely no place for racism on the pitch – it should be kept on the terraces of Italy, Spain and Eastern Europe where it belongs.